DVD Audio Commentary track questions.

[MrTorso]

If you are a MST3K fan you probably know that Mike Nelson is now selling mp3s of him riffing on various movies. He sells them at www.rifftrax.com. I have been making DVDs with his audio track embedded. One thing that has been hard is first syncing up the track to the movie's audio. They give you easy ways to do it, it is just time consuming. My biggest problem has been getting the volume levels right. Sometimes the rifftrax is way too loud or the movie gets louder in certain scenes and drowns out Mike's jokes. On most commentary tracks the movie volume will dip down when the commentator talks. Are there any programs that could do this automatically?


Thanks!

[guns1inger]

There are two type of commentary tracks - those that are solo, and those that are mixed over the movie audio. Those that are solo are easy, you can just normalise if the change a lot, or simply adjust the volume before encoding.

Those that are mixed over the movie audio require manual intervention. The best software I have used for mixing down a whole track (and syncing it up) is Sony Vegas. You put the audio tracks next to each other, add a volume envelope to each track, and then just vary them up and down as needed.

Frankly, I find mixed audio commentaries more annoying than solo ones because they often aren't mixed too well. You also often find that commentary tracks that are mixed like this are done this way because they have long gaps where the people doing the commentary simply had nothing interesting to say. Solo tracks are usually non-stop and full of interesting info.